The Certain Hour (Dizain des Poëtes) Page 14

  He was hoping, while his fingers drummed in unison with the beat of hisverse, that this last play at least would rouse enthusiasm in the pit.The welcome given its immediate predecessors had undeniably been tepid.A memorandum at his elbow of the receipts at the Globe for the lastquarter showed this with disastrous bluntness; and, after all, in 1609a shareholder in a theater, when writing dramas for production there,was ordinarily subject to more claims than those of his ideals.

  He sat in a neglected garden whose growth was in reversion to primalhabits. The season was September, the sky a uniform and temperateblue. A peachtree, laden past its strength with fruitage, made abouthim with its boughs a sort of tent. The grass around his writing-tablewas largely hidden by long, crinkled peach leaves--some brown andothers gray as yet--and was dotted with a host of brightly-coloredpeaches. Fidgeting bees and flies were excavating the decayed spots inthis wasting fruit, from which emanated a vinous odor. The bees hummeddrowsily, their industry facilitating idleness in others. It wascurious--he meditated, his thoughts straying from "an uninhabitedisland"--how these insects alternated in color between brown velvet andsilver, as they blundered about a flickering tessellation of amber anddark green . . . in search of rottenness. . . .

  He frowned. Here was an arid forenoon as imagination went. A seasonedplagiarist by this, he opened a book which lay upon the table amongseveral others and duly found the chapter entitled _Of the Cannibals_.

  "So, so!" he said aloud. "'It is a nation,' would I answer Plato,'that has no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters----'" And withthat he sat about reshaping Montaigne's conceptions of Utopia intoverse. He wrote--while his left hand held the book flat--as orderly asany county-clerk might do in the recordance of a deed of sale.

  Midcourse in larceny, he looked up from writing. He saw a tall, darklady who was regarding him half-sorrowfully and half as in the grasp ofsome occult amusement. He said nothing. He released the telltalebook. His eyebrows lifted, banteringly. He rose.

  He found it characteristic of her that she went silently to the tableand compared the printed page with what he had just written. "Sonowadays you have turned pickpocket? My poet, you have altered."

  He said: "Why, yes. When you broke off our friendship, I paid you theexpensive compliment of falling very ill. They thought that I woulddie. They tell me even to-day I did not die. I almost question it."He shrugged. "And to-day I must continue to write plays, because Inever learned any other trade. And so, at need, I pilfer." The topicdid not seem much to concern him.

  "Eh, and such plays!" the woman cried. "My poet, there was a time whenyou created men and women as glibly as Heaven does. Now you makesugar-candy dolls."

  "The last comedies were not all I could have wished," he assented. "Infact, I got only some L30 clear profit."

  "There speaks the little tradesman I most hated of all persons living!"the woman sighed. Now, as in impatience, she thrust back hertraveling-hood and stood bare-headed.

  Then she stayed silent,--tall, extraordinarily pallid, and with dark,steady eyes. Their gaze by ordinary troubled you, as seeming to hintsome knowledge to your belittlement. The playmaker remembered that.Now he, a reputable householder, was wondering what would be the upshotof this intrusion. His visitor, as he was perfectly aware, had littlepatience with such moments of life as could not be made dramatic. . . .He was recollecting many trifles, now his mind ran upon oldtimes. . . . No, no, reflection assured him, to call her beautifulwould be, and must always have been, an exaggeration; but to deny theexotic and somewhat sinister charm of her, even to-day, would be anabsurdity.

  She said, abruptly: "I do not think I ever loved you as women lovemen. You were too anxious to associate with fine folk, too eager tosecure a patron--yes, and to get your profit of him--and you werealways ill-at-ease among us. Our youth is so long past, and we two areso altered that we, I think, may speak of its happenings now withoutany bitterness. I hated those sordid, petty traits. I raged at yourincessant pretensions to gentility because I knew you to be so muchmore than a gentleman. Oh, it infuriated me--how long ago it was!--tosee you cringing to the Court blockheads, and running their errands,and smirkingly pocketing their money, and wheedling them into helpingthe new play to success. You complained I treated you like a lackey;it was not unnatural when of your own freewill you played the lackey soassiduously."

  He laughed. He had anatomized himself too frequently and with too muchdispassion to overlook whatever tang of snobbishness might be in him;and, moreover, the charge thus tendered became in reality the speaker'sapology, and hurt nobody's self-esteem.

  "Faith, I do not say you are altogether in the wrong," he assented."They could be very useful to me--Pembroke, and Southampton, and thoseothers--and so I endeavored to render my intimacy acceptable. It wasmy business as a poet to make my play as near perfect as I could; andthis attended to, common-sense demanded of the theater-manager that hederive as much money as was possible from its representation. Whatwould you have? The man of letters, like the carpenter or theblacksmith, must live by the vending of his productions, not by theeating of them." The woman waved this aside.

  She paced the grass in meditation, the peach leaves brushing her proudhead--caressingly, it seemed to him. Later she came nearer in abrand-new mood. She smiled now, and her voice was musical and thrilledwith wonder. "But what a poet Heaven had locked inside this littleparasite! It used to puzzle me." She laughed, and ever so lightly."Eh, and did you never understand why by preference I talked with youat evening from my balcony? It was because I could forget you thenentirely. There was only a voice in the dark. There was a sorcerer atwhose bidding words trooped like a conclave of emperors, and now sanglike a bevy of linnets. And wit and fancy and high aspirations and mylove--because I knew then that your love for me was splendid anddivine--these also were my sorcerer's potent allies. I understood thenhow glad and awed were those fabulous Greekish queens when a god wooedthem. Yes, then I understood. How long ago it seems!"

  "Yes, yes," he sighed. "In that full-blooded season was Guenevere alass, I think, and Charlemagne was not yet in breeches."

  "And when there was a new play enacted I was glad. For it was our playthat you and I had polished the last line of yesterday, and all thesepeople wept and laughed because of what we had done. And I wasproud----" The lady shrugged impatiently. "Proud, did I say? andglad? That attests how woefully I fall short of you, my poet. Youwould have found some magic phrase to make that ancient gloryarticulate, I know. Yet,--did I ever love you? I do not know that. Ionly know I sometimes fear you robbed me of the power of loving anyother man."

  He raised one hand in deprecation. "I must remind you," he cried,whimsically, "that a burnt child dreads even to talk of fire."

  Her response was a friendly nod. She came yet nearer. "What," shedemanded, and her smile was elfish, "what if I had lied to you? Whatif I were hideously tired of my husband, that bluff, stolid captain?What if I wanted you to plead with me as in the old time?"

  He said: "Until now you were only a woman. Oh, and now, my dear, youare again that resistless gipsy who so merrily beguiled me to the veryheart of loss. You are Love. You are Youth. You are Comprehension.You are all that I have had, and lost, and vainly hunger for. Here inthis abominable village, there is no one who understands--not eventhose who are more dear to me than you are. I know. I only spoil goodpaper which might otherwise be profitably used to wrap herrings in,they think. They give me ink and a pen just as they would give toys toa child who squalled for them too obstinately. And Poesy is a thriftyoracle with no words to waste upon the deaf, however loudly herinterpreter cry out to her. Oh, I have hungered for you, my proud,dark lady!" the playmaker said.

  Afterward they stood quite silent. She was not unmoved by his outcry;and for this very reason was obscurely vexed by the reflection that itwould be the essay of a braver man to remedy, rather than to lament,his circumstances. And then the moment's rapture failed him.
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  "I am a sorry fool," he said; and lightly he ran on: "You are askilful witch. Yet you have raised the ghost of an old madness to nopurpose. You seek a master-poet? You will find none here. Perhaps Iwas one once. But most of us are poets of one sort or another when welove. Do you not understand? To-day I do not love you any more than Ido Hecuba. Is it not strange that I should tell you this and not bemoved at all? Is it not laughable that we should stand here at thelast, two feet apart as things physical go, and be as profoundlysevered as if an ocean tumbled between us?"

  He fell to walking to and fro, his hands behind his back. She waited,used as she was to his unstable temperament, a trifle puzzled.Presently he spoke:

  "There was a time when a master-poet was needed. He wasfound--nay,--rather made. Fate hastily caught up a man not verydifferent from the run of men--one with a taste for stringing phrasesand with a comedy or so to his discredit. Fate merely bid him love aheadstrong child newly released from the nursery."

  "We know her well enough," she said. "The girl was faithless, andtyrannous, and proud, and coquettish, and unworthy, and false, andinconstant. She was black as hell and dark as night in both her personand her living. You were not niggardly of vituperation."

  And he grimaced. "Faith," he replied, "but sonnets are a more naturalform of expression than affidavits, and they are made effective bycompliance with different rules. I find no flagrant fault with youto-day. You were a child of seventeen, the darling of a noble house,and an actor--yes, and not even a pre-eminent actor--a gross, poorposturing vagabond, just twice your age, presumed to love you. Whatchild would not amuse herself with such engaging toys? Vivacity andprettiness and cruelty are the ordinary attributes of kittenhood. Soyou amused yourself. And I submitted with clear eyes, because I couldnot help it. Yes, I who am by nature not disposed to underestimate mypersonal importance--I submitted, because your mockery was moredesirable than the adoration of any other woman. And all this helpedto make a master-poet of me. Eh, why not, when such monstrous passionsspoke through me--as if some implacable god elected to play godlikemusic on a mountebank's lute? And I made admirable plays. Why not,when there was no tragedy more poignant than mine?--and where in anycomedy was any figure one-half so ludicrous as mine? Ah, yes, Fategained her ends, as always."

  He was a paunchy, inconsiderable little man. By ordinary his elongatedfeatures and high, bald forehead loaned him an aspect of serene andaxiom-based wisdom, much as we see him in his portraits; but now hiscountenance was flushed and mobile. Odd passions played about it, aswhen on a sullen night in August summer lightnings flicker and merge.

  His voice had found another cadence. "But Fate was not entirelyruthless. Fate bade the child become a woman, and so grow tired of allher childhood's playthings. This was after a long while, as weestimate happenings. . . . I suffered then. Yes, I went down to thedoors of death, as people say, in my long illness. But that crude,corporal fever had a providential thievishness; and not content withstripping me of health and strength,--not satisfied with pilferinginventiveness and any strong hunger to create--why, that insatiablefever even robbed me of my insanity. I lived. I was only a brokeninstrument flung by because the god had wearied of playing. I wouldgive forth no more heart-wringing music, for the musician had departed.And I still lived--I, the stout little tradesman whom you loathed.Yes, that tradesman scrambled through these evils, somehow, and cameout still able to word adequately all such imaginings as could bedevised by his natural abilities. But he transmitted no moreheart-wringing music."

  She said, "You lie!"

  He said, "I thank Heaven daily that I do not." He spoke the truth.She knew it, and her heart was all rebellion.

  Indefatigable birds sang through the following hush. A wholesome andtemperate breeze caressed these silent people. Bees that would dieto-morrow hummed about them tirelessly.

  Then the poet said: "I loved you; and you did not love me. It is themost commonplace of tragedies, the heart of every man alive has beenwounded in this identical fashion. A master-poet is only that woundedman--among so many other bleeding folk--who perversely augments hisagony, and utilizes his wound as an inkwell. Presently time scars overthe cut for him, as time does for all the others. He does not sufferany longer. No, and such relief is a clear gain; but none the less, hemust henceforward write with ordinary ink such as the lawyers use."

  "I should have been the man," the woman cried. "Had I been sure offame, could I have known those raptures when you used to gabbleimmortal phrases like a stammering infant, I would have paid the pricewithout all this whimpering."

  "Faith, and I think you would have," he assented. "There is thedifference. At bottom I am a creature of the most moderateaspirations, as you always complained; and for my part, Fate must inreason demand her applause of posterity rather than of me. For Iregret the unlived life that I was meant for--the comfortable levellife of little happenings which all my schoolfellows have passedthrough in a stolid drove. I was equipped to live that life withrelish, and that life only; and it was denied me. It was demolished inorder that a book or two be made out of its wreckage."

  She said, with half-shut eyes: "There is a woman at the root of allthis." And how he laughed!

  "Did I not say you were a witch? Why, most assuredly there is."

  He motioned with his left hand. Some hundred yards away a young man,who was carrying two logs toward New Place, had paused to rest. A girlwas with him. Now laughingly she was pretending to assist the porterin lifting his burden. It was a quaintly pretty vignette, as framed bythe peach leaves, because those two young people were so merry and socandidly in love. A symbolist might have wrung pathos out of thegirl's desire to aid, as set against her fond inadequacy; and theattendant playwright made note of it.

  "Well, well!" he said: "Young Quiney is a so-so choice, since womenmust necessarily condescend to intermarrying with men. But he is farfrom worthy of her. Tell me, now, was there ever a rarer piece ofbeauty?"

  "The wench is not ill-favored," was the dark lady's unenthusiasticanswer. "So!--but who is she?"

  He replied: "She is my daughter. Yonder you see my latter muse forwhose dear sake I spin romances. I do not mean that she takes anylively interest in them. That is not to be expected, since she cannotread or write. Ask her about the poet we were discussing, and I verymuch fear Judith will bluntly inform you she cannot tell a B from abull's foot. But one must have a muse of some sort or another; and soI write about the world now as Judith sees it. My Judith finds thisworld an eminently pleasant place. It is full of laughter andkindliness--for could Herod be unkind to her?--and it is largelypopulated by ardent young fellows who are intended chiefly to betwisted about your fingers; and it is illuminated by sunlight whosereal purpose is to show how pretty your hair is. And if affairs gobadly for a while, and you have done nothing very wrong--why, ofcourse, Heaven will soon straighten matters satisfactorily. Fornothing that happens to us can possibly be anything except a benefit,because God orders all happenings, and God loves us. There you haveJudith's creed; and upon my word, I believe there is a great deal to besaid for it."

  "And this is you," she cried--"you who wrote of Troilus and Timon!"

  "I lived all that," he replied--"I lived it, and so for a long while Ibelieved in the existence of wickedness. To-day I have lost manyillusions, madam, and that ranks among them. I never knew a wickedperson. I question if anybody ever did. Undoubtedly short-sightedpeople exist who have floundered into ill-doing; but it proves alwaysto have been on account of either cowardice or folly, and never becauseof malevolence; and, in consequence, their sorry pickle should demandcommiseration far more loudly than our blame. In short, I findhumanity to be both a weaker and a better-meaning race than I hadsuspected. And so, I make what you call 'sugar-candy dolls,' because Ivery potently believe that all of us are sweet at heart. Oh no! menlack an innate aptitude for sinning; and at worst, we frenziedlyattempt our misdemeanors just as a sheep retaliates
on its pursuers.This much, at least, has Judith taught me."

  The woman murmured: "Eh, you are luckier than I. I had a son. He wasborne of my anguish, he was fed and tended by me, and he was dependenton me in all things." She said, with a half-sob, "My poet, he was solittle and so helpless! Now he is dead."

  "My dear, my dear!" he cried, and he took both her hands. "I also hada son. He would have been a man by this."

  They stood thus for a while. And then he smiled.

  "I ask your pardon. I had forgotten that you hate to touch my hands.I know--they are too moist and flabby. I always knew that you thoughtthat. Well! Hamnet died. I grieved. That is a trivial thing to say.But you also have seen your own flesh lying in a coffin so small thateven my soft hands could lift it. So you will comprehend. To-day Ifind that the roughest winds abate with time. Hatred and self-seekingand mischance and, above all, the frailties innate in us--these buffetus for a while, and we are puzzled, and we demand of God, as Job did,why is this permitted? And then as the hair dwindles, the wit grows."

  "Oh, yes, with age we take a slackening hold upon events; we let allhappenings go by more lightly; and we even concede the universe not tobe under any actual bond to be intelligible. Yes, that is true. Butis it gain, my poet? for I had thought it to be loss."

  "With age we gain the priceless certainty that sorrow and injustice areephemeral. Solvitur ambulando, my dear. I have attested this merelyby living long enough. I, like any other man of my years, have in myday known more or less every grief which the world breeds; and eachmaddened me in turn, as each was duly salved by time; so that to-daytheir ravages vex me no more than do the bee-stings I got when I was anurchin. To-day I grant the world to be composed of muck and sunshineintermingled; but, upon the whole, I find the sunshine more pleasant tolook at, and--greedily, because my time for sightseeing is not verylong--I stare at it. And I hold Judith's creed to be the best of allimaginable creeds--that if we do nothing very wrong, all humanimbroglios, in some irrational and quite incomprehensible fashion, willbe straightened to our satisfaction. Meanwhile, you also voice a tonictruth--this universe of ours, and, reverently speaking, the Maker ofthis universe as well, is under no actual bond to be intelligible indealing with us." He laughed at this season and fell into a lightertone. "Do I preach like a little conventicle-attending tradesman?Faith, you must remember that when I talk gravely Judith listens as ifit were an oracle discoursing. For Judith loves me as the wisest andthe best of men. I protest her adoration frightens me. What if shewere to find me out?"

  "I loved what was divine in you," the woman answered.

  "Oddly enough, that is the perfect truth! And when what was divine inme had burned a sufficiency of incense to your vanity, your vanity'sowner drove off in a fine coach and left me to die in a garret. ThenJudith came. Then Judith nursed and tended and caressed me--and Judithonly in all the world!--as once you did that boy you spoke of. Ah,madam, and does not sorrow sometimes lie awake o' nights in the lowcradle of that child? and sometimes walk with you by day and clasp yourhand--much as his tiny hand did once, so trustingly, so like theclutching of a vine--and beg you never to be friends with anything savesorrow? And do you wholeheartedly love those other women's boys--whodid not die? Yes, I remember. Judith, too, remembered. I was herfather, for all that I had forsaken my family to dance Jack-puddingattendance on a fine Court lady. So Judith came. And Judith, who seesin play-writing just a very uncertain way of making money--Judith, whocannot tell a B from a bull's foot,--why, Judith, madam, did not ask,but gave, what was divine."

  "You are unfair," she cried. "Oh, you are cruel, you juggle words,make knives of them. . . . You" and she spoke as with difficulty--"youhave no right to know just how I loved my boy! You should be eitherman or woman!"

  He said pensively: "Yes, I am cruel. But you had mirth and beautyonce, and I had only love and a vocabulary. Who then more flagrantlyabused the gifts God gave? And why should I not be cruel to you, whomade a master-poet of me for your recreation? Lord, what a deal ofruined life it takes to make a little art! Yes, yes, I know. Underold oaks lovers will mouth my verses, and the acorns are not yet shapedfrom which those oaks will spring. My adoration and your perfidy, allthat I have suffered, all that I have failed in even, has gone towardthe building of an enduring monument. All these will be immortal,because youth is immortal, and youth delights in demanding explanationsof infinity. And only to this end I have suffered and have cataloguedthe ravings of a perverse disease which has robbed my life of all thenormal privileges of life as flame shrivels hair from the arm--thatyoung fools such as I was once might be pleased to murder my rhetoric,and scribblers parody me in their fictions, and schoolboys guess at thedate of my death!" This he said with more than ordinary animation; andthen he shook his head. "There is a leaven," he said--"there is aleaven even in your smuggest and most inconsiderable tradesman."

  She answered, with a wistful smile: "I, too, regret my poet. And justnow you are more like him----"

  "Faith, but he was really a poet--or, at least, at times----?"

  "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive thispowerful rhyme----'"

  "Dear, dear!" he said, in petulant vexation; "how horribly emotionbotches verse. That clash of sibilants is both harsh andungrammatical. _Shall_ should be changed to _will_." And at that thewoman sighed, because, in common with all persons who never essayedcreative verbal composition, she was quite certain perdurable writingmust spring from a surcharged heart, rather than from a rearrangementof phrases. And so,

  "Very unfeignedly I regret my poet," she said, "my poet, who wasunhappy and unreasonable, because I was not always wise or kind, oreven just. And I did not know until to-day how much I loved mypoet. . . . Yes, I know now I loved him. I must go now. I would Ihad not come."

  Then, standing face to face, he cried, "Eh, madam, and what if I alsohave lied to you--in part? Our work is done; what more is there tosay?"

  "Nothing," she answered--"nothing. Not even for you, who are amaster-smith of words to-day and nothing more."

  "I?" he replied. "Do you so little emulate a higher example that evenfor a moment you consider me?"

  She did not answer.

  When she had gone, the playmaker sat for a long while in meditation;and then smilingly he took up his pen. He was bound for "anuninhabited island" where all disasters ended in a happy climax.

  "So, so!" he was declaiming, later on: "_We, too, are kin To dreams andvisions; and our little life Is gilded by such faint and cloud-wrappedsuns_--Only, that needs a homelier touch. Rather, let us say, _We aresuch stuff As dreams are made on_--Oh, good, good!--Now to pad out theline. . . . In any event, the Bermudas are a seasonable topic. Nowhere, instead of _thickly-templed India_, suppose we write _thestill-vexed Bermoothes_--Good, good! It fits in well enough. . . ."

  And so in clerkly fashion he sat about the accomplishment of his stintof labor in time for dinner. A competent workman is not disastrouslyupset by interruption; and, indeed, he found the notion of surprisingJudith with an unlooked-for trinket or so to be at first a veryefficacious spur to composition.

  And presently the strong joy of creating kindled in him, and phraseflowed abreast with thought, and the playmaker wrote fluently andsurely to an accompaniment of contented ejaculations. He regrettednothing, he would not now have laid aside his pen to take up a scepter.For surely--he would have said--to live untroubled, and weave beautifuland winsome dreams is the most desirable of human fates. But he didnot consciously think of this, because he was midcourse in the evokingof a mimic tempest which, having purged its victims of unkindliness anderror, aimed (in the end) only to sink into an amiable calm.